Stephan:   In the early 1970s I was asked to serve on The Secretary of Defense-MIT Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and the Future.  There were 18 of us as I remember, including many of the leading futurists of the day. For most of them the two  most pressing issues were over-population and a failure of resources. They had an obsessive vision of a dystopian world crawling with people and no food to feed them, or energy to power their technology. I strongly disagreed with this, arguing that based on what I saw in the birth rate data, and the development of alternative energy that neither of these were going to be a dominant issue. None of us, of course, knew about climate change. Nobody did. My views made me a minority of one and, since I was also the youngest member of the group, I was more or less dismissed. One of the countries the group was particularly concerned about was Japan, because it is deficient in almost all the natural resources needed to sustain a modern technological society, and has only a small proportion of arable land. Well, here it is 43 years later, and this report describes Japan's present circumstances.